Name: Perrine Anquis
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Race: Human (Aretan Nobility)
Appearance:
To understand Perrine's aesthetic sensibility, one needs know two things: First, in the morn, while the serving girls bathe and dress her, while they attend to her face, her nails, and those impossible sleep-matted curls, Perrine sees in her mind an hourglass, broken, so that with each stroke of the comb, each dab of powder, each new layer of fine silk or cotton that must be folded just so, adjusted, fastened, adjusted again, a few more grains of precious sand are loosed into the wind, lost, never again hers, when there is so much yet to be done. Second, however, this whole damnable process is what it takes to make the Lady Perrine Anquis a thing of relative beauty - to show her wealth, her nobility - to make her a lady at all. An upstart girl and would-be heiress to an ailing lord can afford to be nothing less if she hopes to be taken seriously.
Frankly, Perrine is short - about 4'11" - with soft, rounded features that, prior to paints and powders, leave a common, even vacant impression. Her skin is a sandy shade of light tan and smooth in that way afforded by the union of youth and the avoidance of physical stress, if not unblemished by the occasional mole or birthmark. Her oft tired eyes are the deep brown of cloves. Her hair (that same hue) she keeps trimmed just below the shoulder blades - an inadequate compromise to convenience, in the name of propriety Her dress is informed by those same warring principles. It is fine, to be sure, and hews close enough to the present trends to avoid scandal, but is never more elaborate than it needs to be. On a good day, she is elegant.
Brief character concept:
Perrine is the second daughter of the twice-widowed Lord Demour Anquis, baron of Greenbank, a stretch of land along the Neratine once famous for its verdancy, though it has since been claimed by the desert. The Anquis are a wealthy family, but Demour's health is failing, and it has fallen to Perrine to aid him in those duties which must be kept within the family, and in recent years she has become known as the public face of House Anquis at court.
Perrine is ambitious, precocious, and well-tutored. She prefers directness to subtlety in interpersonal matters, though she has not always found this approach to work out in her favor, and struggles to conduct her affairs with a lighter touch. She works hard, but patience is not her strongest suit. In the quiet hours, of which there are few, she is prone to loneliness and exhaustion.
She is no fighter, but rarely travels unchaperoned, and can rely on the Anquis House Guard for protection or violence if the need arises. She carries a small dagger and knows enough anatomy to cut someone somewhere vital - at least in theory. In times of larger scale conflict, House Anquis can rally the lesser nobles and peasantry of Greenbank into a considerable fighting force, and is wealthy enough to supplement its numbers through the hire of mercenary companies.
Finally, her goals are simple: Perrine will supplant her younger half-brother as the heir to her father's name, titles, and estate. When her father passes, which she fears may be sooner than later, she will take his place at the head of the Anquis family. She will lead her house to glory, power, and wealth. She will protect her father's legacy.
History:
Demour Anquis married twice. His first wife, Emeline bore him two sons and two daughters. The eldest son was Sacha, followed a year later by the brother-and-sister twins Auguste and Katelle, followed six years after that by Perrine herself. Three summers later, Emiline caught fever, and passed, and the next spring Auguste drowned in the Neratine. Demour mourned the losses of his wife and son, and it was some time before he remarried Nolwenn, a younger lady from Marion Bay, who died birthing his final son, Mathys. Some say the grief finally took him, though Demour was hardly a man of great constitution to begin with; whatever the cause, his health began to fail soon after, and has only worsened in the years since.
When Perrine was thirteen, her eldest brother Sacha, then a knight, was wounded in a skirmish and did not survive the trek home. With Katelle long since married to an up-and-coming lord from the northeast, and Mathys a mere lad of six, it was left to Perrine to aid their father with the house's affairs - a mountain of duties which has only grown as his condition continued to deteriorate. When her father's health declined too much to travel the Neratine by barge, it was Perrine who was selected to represent House Anquis at court in Marion Bay.
In the intervening years, Perrine has spent much of her spare time studying, preparing for a day when she must lead without her father's insight to guide her. Letters and numbers, anatomy, philosophy and scripture, geography and history, the tactics and logistics of war, and the harsh laws of nature, commerce, and politics - all the things needed to rule justly, and (more to the point) effectively.
Affiliations:
Like many the ambitious young noble (and more than a few of the bored ones, though boredom is a feeling she can scarce recall), Perrine has sought camaraderie, intrigue, and the promise of gifts and favors owed in the form of membership in a few of the secret societies which pepper the shaded alleys of Marion Bay, if one knows where to look. She is a member of two: The Sorority of the Red Crocodile, and The Circle of Mirth.
The Sorority of the Red Crocodile, or The Sisters Red, for short, is a women's society that exists primarily to form bonds between its own members and facilitate the mobilization of skills, information, and resources for mutual benefit and, if need be, protection. Largely, they are loyal to their own. The Sisters Red have occasionally been known to participate in charitable endeavors, but the group is also rumored to be have ties to black markets throughout the cities of Areta, and even to be involved in espionage and assassination. If there is some deeper purpose behind the organization besides its stated mission of sorority for its own sake, however, Perrine is not in the know.
The Circle of Mirth is a mystery cult to the smiling angel Hayaz, an exotic, foreign deity diplomatically reclassified and subordinated to the Aretan's True God for all the obvious reasons. The cult has a small central temple in Marion Bay, and even smaller chapels in most of Areta's other population centers. It keeps a low profile, and keeps most of its core doctrines and practices a secret from the general public, and indeed its own membership. The cult is deeply hierarchical and information is doled out sparingly, tier by tier. Entry level parishioners are concerned primarily with currying favor from Hayaz himself through various simple rituals and sacrifices. As one goes a bit deeper, the basic doctrine is revealed: a rejection of asceticism and the embrace of excess. Hayaz teaches that what God has put into the world is a gift for Man, and it can be no sin to accept it. At first, excess is understood in more or less purely hedonistic terms, and the cult has not managed completely to quell the rumors of ritual orgies (this is likely by design - a cynical ploy attract to new members). At the next tier, it is understood that just as it cannot be sinful to indulge oneself in too much pleasure, so too the quest for power is not made more virtuous by temperance. This doctrine is guarded more closely, as it leads quite naturally into the core heresy of the Circle:
Magic is of God, and it is for Man to do with as he sees fit.
This revelation marks the point of no return for the acolyte. Should one attempt to leave the Circle with this knowledge in their minds, or worse, to share it with the uninitiated, they will be tracked down and killed. Those they have spoken with will be tracked down and killed. The Circle of Mirth can afford to spares no expense in guarding secrets as dangerous as these.
The payoff, however, is that this is when the instruction in magic begins. Simple cantrips, at first, the equivalent of parlor tricks, but there are promises of more: for the patient, the dedicated, untold power awaits.
For her part, Perrine has seen and mastered only the first few cantrips, with none of the theory behind them, but she is nothing if not dedicated.
Member
